Month: October 2021

The USA: A Nation at War

We’ve been at war for 206 of our 246 years.

We’ve been at war for 206 of or our 246 years of existence.

If you saw my last post, you know that I started looking at American wars as a way to see how many American Indian tribes we actually went to war with as a country. That led me further, however, to looking at all of our wars. Here is the data that I found, which I’m putting in the sort of overview that was certainly missing from my schooling when I was growing up.

We’ve engaged in 98 different conflicts. That’s one new war every two and a half years. At most, in 1918, we were in engaged in 8 conflicts at once. Many times, we’ve been engaged in seven different wars at once.

1855: Cayuse War, Apache Wars, Bleeding Kansas, Puget Sound War, Rogue River Wars, Third Seminole War, Yakima War

1856: Apache Wars, Bleeding Kansas, Puget Sound War, Rogue River Wars, Third Seminole War, Yakima War, Second Opium War

1858: Apache Wars, Bleeding Kansas, Third Seminole War, Yakima War, Second Opium War, Utah War, Navajo Wars

1865: Apache Wars, Navajo Wars, American Civil War, Yavapai Wars, Colorado War, Snake War, Powder River War

1917: Apache Wars, Yaqui Wars, Border War, Occupation of Nicaragua, United States occupation of Haiti, United States occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–1924), World War I

1918 (8): Apache Wars, Yaqui Wars, Border War, Occupation of Nicaragua, United States occupation of Haiti, United States occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–1924), World War I, Russian Civil War

2015: War in Afghanistan, Second U.S. Intervention in the Somali Civil War, Operation Ocean Shield, Operation Observant Compass, American-led intervention in Iraq, American-led intervention in Syria, American intervention in Libya

2016 (same wars as 2015): War in Afghanistan, Second U.S. Intervention in the Somali Civil War, Operation Ocean Shield, Operation Observant Compass, American-led intervention in Iraq, American-led intervention in Syria, American intervention in Libya

I’m taking this list of wars from Wikipedia, so keep in mind it may not be definitive. Some people may want to argue that some of these weren’t “declared” wars, or that they weren’t very “hot” wars, I don’t have any interest in really touching that.

I must confess that I did not even know that we occupied Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic at the same time – while we were participating in World War I. The heavy war years of the 1800’s demonstrate how completely we were fighting against American Indian tribes of that time. The Apache Wars went from 1849-1924, though fighting had mostly stopped a few years before 1924. That’s still a 75 year conflict that I knew next to nothing about – that’s 30% of the entire life of America as a country that we were engaged in the Apache Wars. The list above also illustrates how war-heavy our recent years have been, though we often act as if we are not a country at war in modern times. But I suspect, except for the major wars, it has mostly been that way.

A snapshot of the most violent years of the 1800’s in America
The violent years of the early 1900’s
Our most recent era

When was the last year that America did not engage in war? 1985. Our last sustained peace was from 1976-1981. Since it doesn’t make a lot of sense to try to view a spreadsheet like this in PDF format, I’ll give you all this link so you can scroll through if you like.

In terms of amount of wars over a relatively short period of time, 246 years, I don’t know how we compare to other nations of the world. I find it unlikely that I’ll make the time to put together spreadsheets like this for a lot of other countries. Knowing that we have engaged in some sort of war every 2.5 years of our existence is quite informative, in my view. In the 96 years since the final American Indian conflict ended (the final action of the Apache Wars) in 1924, the US has engaged in 31 conflicts. That’s a new conflict every 3.1 years. That’s certainly an improvement over our overall average, but it’s still 3 conflicts each decade. In the 149 years that we were fighting American Indians, we engaged in 69 wars in total. During that time, that was a new war every 2.2 years.

What are my takeaways here? The USA has been at war in one fashion or another for 84% of it’s existence. It’s no wonder that we became active in foreign interventions once the ongoing wars against American Indians came to an end – the public and our institutions were already accustomed to near constant war. That energy needed to go somewhere. This year we have been involved in 4 wars, currently we are still active in 3.

It does seem that it would take a sea change in the way America operates, and the realities of international politics, for America’s thirst for war to go away any time. It may morph, a notable short term improvement in the way our military operates would be to simply stop engaging in conflicts with insurrectionists in foreign countries, but I don’t see our politics changing so dramatically that we are going to significantly increase or decrease the pace at which we engage in war.

For Indigenous People’s Day, I Made A Spreadsheet

You know if I care enough to make a spreadsheet about it, I really care

Something I heard a while ago has stuck with me. I don’t remember the exact wording of what the person said, at all, but it was something like this: “Of course there was vibrant, established civilization in the Americas before white people showed up.” Like, the land here wasn’t free for the taking. It was conquered, nations were destroyed, people were displaced.

Growing up where and when I did, this reality was downplayed when I was taught history. People who subjugated Native Americans weren’t outright celebrated for the subjugation, but they were often excused or celebrated for other reasons. I remember my high school history teacher excusing Andrew Jackson‘s exploits before and during his presidency by saying that the American people would inevitably have pushed the Seminole out of Florida, he just tried to do it as humanely as possible. Of course, Columbus Day was still a thing when I was growing up as well. I guess it still is.

Anyway, I’ve been reading this book

Excuse my phrasing here, but reading about Indian war after Indian war after Indian war after Indian war just got to be so much. Like, how much did we do this?

So I went and looked at the list of American wars on Wikipedia. Somehow it never sank in for me the true extent of how much war our country engaged in with Native Americans.

Here’s an image of my first version of the spreadsheet

On the left, each tribe that was involved in an American war. That’s 70 tribes. Some tribes were allied with the US for some wars. Most weren’t. Some were allies sometimes, enemies others. I haven’t, and will not for this post, gone into depth on all the wars that the US engaged in with Native American tribes. What struck me is the sheer volume. The nonstop war. From the moment the USA first started to exist (which I’m marking at the beginning of the Revolutionary War) until 1924 – a 149 year span – I only counted 32 years where we weren’t engaged in some sort of military action against Native American tribes. That’s over one hundred years of conflict. There were times, especially in the 1850’s and 1860’s, where the US was fighting five or six conflicts against natives at once. I counted eight conflicts, some years-long, that took place during the Civil War. Our Civil War cost us hundreds of thousands of lives, yet we had the bandwidth to fight eight other conflicts with Native Americans?

I counted 69 wars that America engaged in between 1775 and 1924. 42 were exclusively against native tribes. That’s 61%. Also… with all the wars put together that’s a new war every 2.2 years. That’s a lot of war. Take out the wars against Native Americans, and we still engaged in a war every 5.5 years. That seems like a lot. But this stuff is for my next post, not this one…

We went to war with some tribes so many times. The Cheyenne? Seven times. Arapaho? Six times. Paiute? Five times. Comanche? Four times. Seminole? Four times (The Seminole apparently fought us in a First Seminole War, a Second Seminole War, and a Third Seminole War). Shoshone? Four times. Sioux? Six times.

The drip, drip, drip of war against many of these tribes was something I didn’t understand before. If we couldn’t or didn’t get a tribe to do what we wanted the first time we’d just keep coming back over and over again. No peace was a final peace, it seems, until finally the Native Americans took whatever we were willing to give them. It seemed that as soon as we were done with one tribe, or one area, we would go on to another tribe and go to war against them until we ground them down too. Until we ground them all down.

Here’s the PDF of my spreadsheet, if you’d like to browse it. I was only able to put one link in each cell, so if you want to read about a war that isn’t linked just look amongst the other tribes to find a link to the war.

Tribes of American Wars_US War Timeline – Sheet1Download

Of course there was a vibrant civilization here, it was nearly 150 years after the start of our country before it was finally beaten. Before that, more than 150 years as well.

All this data is off of Wikipedia, so it is should all be considered approximate. However, I think the greater point still stands…